If you happen to be at the Indianapolis Museum of Art later today, say 5pm, you’ll have a chance of discovering Bloggers Anonymous. It’s our third event of BA, and something pretty different from what we typically do regarding technology. We’re actually meeting people face-to-face. At the IMA, we kind of dig technology and spend a lot of time developing digital projects, like this blog, ArtBabble, TAP and a million other things. We really love our work, but I guess there would be one draw back to what we do.
Bing.com – Over the weekend, Microsoft launched a new search product called Bing. Supposedly, Bing should excel at helping users with “making a purchase decision, trip planning, finding local businesses and researching health conditions.” It looks like Bing can help me the next time I need to find a neighborhood apothecary to sell me a secret syrup that will take care of the cough I picked up on vacation.
Brooklyn Museum Mobile Collection iPhone App – Well done Brooklyn! iPhone users, download this app to browse and search the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. It’s still a young lil’ app so help their developers out and leave feedback on their blog about your experience. As Daniel hinted, we’re working on one of our own.
The 101 Most Important Painters of All Time – One of my favorite parts about the Web 2.0 world has to be the all the lists. And while 101 painters are way too many for this ad man to keep handy on a cheat sheet, this page is a fun rundown of some of the names I should probably know. If you’re into lists, here’s a list of lists…
Monday Music – “Mother of All Funk Chords” by Kutiman. This is incredible. This is incredible.
Based on the title of this post, expect a lot of different things from me today. Yesterday, in the midst of figuring out a post topic, I turned to Facebook & Twitter for topic suggestions. Some people responded with some thoughtful concepts, so I want to address those in some ways. “Woody Woodpecker” isn’t just being used as a clever title to get you to read my entry. Keep reading, its relevant. And I wanted to start with a quick shout out to On the Cusp, who just launched a new design for their site. I like it and I think you will too. Check out the new look and learn what’s going on in the local Indianapolis arts scene.
I thought I would follow up Ed’s MW2009 preview with an after the fact look at the online remnants of the conference.
Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award. A huge congratulations from all of us at the IMA for a well-deserved recognition. (Be sure to watch their virtual thank you.) As if that weren’t enough, I totally missed the news that Brooklyn released an API for their collection. Even better, someone has already created an iPhone app for them using it. Open developer access to the IMA’s collection just got a huge bump in priority for me.
We had a great meetup with some of the tech staff of NYPL. Their group is of a scale and quality that we are quite envious of. We are greatly looking forward to future collaborations with them. (They’re an ArtBabble partner.)
Our own Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO gave the opening keynote which you can watch in full on ArtBabble or at the bottom of this post. It even inspired a greatseries on transparency for the Museums and the Web conference itself.
The IMA blog staff is filled with all types. Some of them know their blog topics weeks ahead of time. Some work at a steady pace and figure out an idea a couple of days in advance. Some (me) usually wait until the last minute. I realized this yesterday and turned to Twitter and Facebook for inspiration. Some suggestions were inappropriate for an IMA post, some were funny, some were thoughtful, and I had a lot of people suggest blogging about IMA’s Deaccessioned artwork page. Yes it’s cool….it’s transparent….it’s many things….but I had absolutely nothing to do with it. If you do want more info, bug Charlie or IMA’s registration department- bravo to everyone involved in that project.
Thinking about that page led me to think more broadly about IMA’s main website. Inside the museum, the IMA site is a major topic of conversation amongst the web team. We’re in the planning stages for a web redesign of imamuseum.org. This will include a better calendar system, better integration of digital content, a new collection page and lots more bells and whistles I can’t mention right now. This process has really made me consider one word and one section: Interact.
